Five cleaning jobs that are actually maintenance

There is a category of household job that gets filed under cleaning and is actually maintenance. It looks like tidying, it feels like tidying, and skipping it does not cost you anything visible for about four years. Then it costs a lot at once.

These are the five I would put at the top of that list. None of them are difficult. All of them are on the outside of the house or the back of an appliance, which is exactly why they get missed — almost every cleaning schedule ever written stops at the front door.

1. The gutters, and then the downspouts separately

Clearing leaves out of the trough is the job everybody knows about. Running a hose down each downspout afterwards is the job that actually matters, and it is the one that gets skipped, because the gutter looks clean once the leaves are out.

A blocked downspout turns a working gutter into a decorative one. The water goes over the edge at the exact point where the blockage is, lands in a concentrated stream, and does it in the same spot every single storm. That is how you get an eroded channel beside the foundation and, eventually, water where you do not want it.

Then follow the water to where the downspout puts it. A downspout that discharges two feet from the wall is one of the most common and cheapest-to-fix problems on any house, and I have written about it at length in where to put downspout water.

Timing note: clean after the leaves are actually down, not in early autumn when it feels like the right time. Doing it twice is better than doing it early once.

2. The dryer vent, all the way to the outside

Everybody cleans the lint screen. Fewer people clean the duct behind the dryer, and fewer still check the hood on the exterior wall where it terminates.

This one has a genuine fire consequence attached to it. The U.S. Fire Administration, analysing 2008–2010 data, estimated around 2,900 clothes dryer fires in residential buildings reported to fire departments each year, and found that failure to clean was the leading contributing factor, at 34 per cent — comfortably ahead of every mechanical and electrical cause. The data is old now, but the mechanism has not changed.

While you are outside, check that the flap on the exterior hood actually opens when the dryer runs and closes when it stops. A hood painted shut or blocked by a bird's nest produces exactly the condition the statistic describes.

3. The outdoor condenser coil

The outdoor half of an air conditioning system is a heat exchanger that works by pulling air through a fin surface. Grass clippings, cottonwood, dust and the shrub somebody planted eighteen inches away all reduce how much air gets through it.

The unit does not fail when this happens. It just runs longer and hotter to do the same work, which you pay for monthly and which shortens the life of the compressor. It is a slow, invisible cost, which is why it survives on the to-do list for years.

Keeping the area around it clear is a landscaping job as much as a mechanical one. If you are mowing towards it, you are feeding it clippings.

4. Yard drains, grates and swales

If your property has surface drains, catch basins or a shaped swale, those are cleaning jobs with a drainage consequence. Leaves and silt collect at exactly the low points that are supposed to move water, and a grate that is eighty per cent blocked looks fine from ten feet away.

The failure mode here is seasonal and predictable. Everything works all summer, the leaves come down in November, and the first heavy winter rain finds a drain that cannot take it. Clearing them in late autumn, after the leaf drop, is a ten-minute job that prevents a genuinely annoying one.

5. The north wall, and the line where mulch meets siding

Green growth on siding is mostly a shade-and-moisture story, which is why it appears on the north and shaded elevations first. Washing it off is cosmetic. Noticing why that wall stays damp is not.

While you are down there, look at where the soil and mulch sit against the siding. Over years of topping up beds, the level creeps upward, and eventually mulch is sitting against material that was never meant to be in contact with wet organic matter. That is a slow problem with an expensive ending, and the fix is a rake rather than a contractor — provided you catch it.

Put them on the rotation, not on the wish list

The only reliable way I know to get these done is to give them a slot in the same rotation as the kitchen and the bathrooms, rather than leaving them on a separate list of outside jobs that gets deferred whenever it is raining or hot.

One day a week that goes outside is enough for most houses. Saturday, thirty minutes, walk the exterior and look up. The quarterly and seasonal versions of these five are the ones that need scheduling properly.

I built the schedule I use as a Cleaning Schedule and Home Reset Planner: daily reset, a seven-day rotation with a Saturday that goes outside, monthly, and quarterly and seasonal lists that carry sixteen exterior items alongside the interior ones. It is a fillable PDF with working checkboxes, or it prints.

The planner is not the point. Putting the outside of the house on the same list as the inside is the point.

One safety note

Never mix cleaning products, and in particular never mix anything containing bleach with anything containing ammonia or an acid. The result is genuinely dangerous. One product at a time, rinse between them, open a window. And anything involving a ladder, a roof or gas is your own call about what you are comfortable doing — some of it is a job for somebody who does it for a living.

Who wrote this

Alex Purdy owns Carolina Terrain LLC in Waxhaw, North Carolina, and holds NC Landscape Contractor Licence CL.1872, the NC State Stormwater Control Measure Inspection and Maintenance Certification (#5970), and NDS Certified Drainage Contractor status. He is not a home inspector and not a licensed general, electrical, plumbing or HVAC contractor. This is a maintenance article, not an inspection and not advice about any specific system in your house.

Sources

• Clothes dryer fire estimates and the “failure to clean” contributing factor: Clothes Dryer Fires in Residential Buildings (2008–2010), U.S. Fire Administration, Topical Fire Report Series Volume 13, Issue 7.